“We have been impressed by the great effort that your government has taken to improve the living standards of the majority of Venezuelans. … what Venezuela has been able to achieve in so little time will be a source of inspiration and ideas for many in Australia.”

Phillip Adams – Journalist, Republican of the Year 2005

I wonder what these people are now thinking of the reports coming out of the tragic Venezuelan basket case. Pity we missed out on the advice Hugo would have been able to give us on running an economy had he visited Australia as the below signatories had desired.

We, the undersigned citizens of Australia, would like to extend a warm invitation for you to visit our country. We have watched developments in Venezuela with great interest. We have been impressed by the great effort that your government has taken to improve the living standards of the majority of Venezuelans. We have also noted with keen attention the moves that your government has begun to make to create a society based on popular participation in all spheres of society—from the workplace up to the national government.
Although we are on the opposite side of the globe we feel that our shared ideals of social justice and democracy bring us close together. Every country has its own traditions and culture and has to find its own solutions, but what Venezuela has been able to achieve in so little time will be a source of inspiration and ideas for many in Australia.

In this light we believe that a visit to our country by yourself would not only help to improve the awareness of the Australian people of developments in Venezuela, but also be an unparalleled opportunity to strengthen the ties of friendship and solidarity between our two peoples.

It might sound uncharitable but Mark Steyn is far more clear headed about what this tragedy signals than those “saddy-saddy-sadcakes” who tend to ineffectual pacifist dreaming. It made him very angry … because he has been saying this for nearly a decade.

The European Union doesn’t need to imagine John Lennon’s “Imagine” because it lives in it. As I wrote nine years ago in my book America Alone:

“Imagine there’s no heaven.” No problem. Large majorities of Scandinavians and Dutchmen and Belgians are among the first peoples in human history to be unable to imagine there’s any possibility of heaven: no free people have ever been so voluntarily secular.

“Imagine all the people/Living for today.” Check.

“Imagine there’s no countries.” Check. The EU is a post-nationalist pseudo-state.

“Nothing to kill or die for/And no religion, too.” You got it.

And yet somehow “all the people/Living life in peace” doesn’t seem to be working out.

As he rightly points out, “We sing the same crappy songs but we do not live in John Lennon’s 1970.”

While we were “living for today”, Islam was playing for tomorrow. When you sing “Imagine”, you’re saying you can’t imagine anything beyond the torpor of the moment. You can’t imagine that there are people who don’t think as you do, and who regard the cobwebbed boomer-pop solidarity as confirmation of nothing more than your flaccid passivity.

Launched this month, a new book by Ian Plimer, Heaven and Hell, is a frontal attack on the absurd, science-free claims peddled by, of all people, Pope Francis in his recent encyclical, Laudate ‘Si.

Throughout the book the author lists many of the infamously false predictions and bogus items of “evidence” from clomate scientists and the media. This litany provokes incredulity and quiet rage as the reader is confronted time and again by the gullibility of journalists, whose professional responsibility it is to be better informed. That the global warming scam and scandal has flourished for as long as it has testifies to the scientific illiteracy and political leanings endemic in modern newsrooms.

The so-called secular rebels were in fact vicious Islamists in disguise.

It gives me no joy to say that I thought the West’s strategy was wrong four years ago.

I have thought this all along and posted several blogs on what appeared to me to be obvious. Why could we not learn from the disaster in Lybia and the delusion of an Arab Spring?

This latest summary by John R Bradley, a British journalist specialising in Middle Eastern affairs, would have to be the most profoundly depressing and saddening account of bad decisions and unintended consequences I have read in a long time.

At the outset of Syria’s brutal four-year civil war, I was an almost unique voice in the British media deploring the push to depose the secular dictator President Bashar al-Assad, especially in the absence of a genuinely popular uprising against him. …

Assad, I argued, would not fall, because the people of Damascus would not rise up against him. The so-called secular rebels were in fact vicious Islamists in disguise. …

Four years on, the suffering of the Syrian people — 250,000 slaughtered, half of the population internally displaced and millions more made refugees — is obvious. And last week, in the midst of Europe’s biggest refugee crisis since the second world war, the extent of the West’s geopolitical miscalculations became painfully evident.

This clearly is the net result:

Assad is in fact now more popular than ever in the roughly one third of Syria he still controls … The West, though, is more hated than ever. A recent poll found that 80 per cent of Syrians believe we created the Islamic State — a common belief, incidentally, throughout the Middle East (and not entirely inaccurate). So it took Washington and its reactionary Gulf allies four years and billions of dollars to end up eating humble pie. They have now effectively admitted that Moscow was right about Syria all along. In the process, they have undermined any humanitarian credibility our military adventurism may still have had after the Iraq nightmare.

In my blog I quoted an article by Fiona Hill on ABC’s The Drum. She reported the desperate plea of a Syrian Christian woman, “What are your so-called Christian leaders in Australia thinking? Don’t they realise our freedoms in Syria are the envy of other Arab countries – and impossible in Qatar?! If Bashar (Al Assad) goes, we will be lambs to the slaughter.”

Tragically they were and the consequences are rippling out alarmingly across Europe to the Arctic circle.

The latest earnest issue being feverishly discussed in our media is the almost universal condemnation of the booing of star AFL footballer Adam Goode.

The whole tone of debate on this issue is quite suffocating.

Everyone is wondering why: and at the same time condemning it. Like most public debates when there are calls of racism, NO ONE seems to want to understand it. The irony of this is that it will lead to inflaming things further.

If we really want to know why there is condemnation for this man then read what the people who are doing it say about him and try to understand rather than silence.

A flood of letters to The Australian basically said it was Goodes’ own fault. In summary:

Calling someone an ape is a throw away line used on anyone, regardless of origin, especially in football matches.

Goode made a fool of himself by bullying a 13 year old girl.

Authorities then chose to make her a national disgrace

Punters don’t like people playing the race card, on or off the field

If he can’t stand the heat he should get another job — such as politics

Clearly, this has nothing to do with race, it has everything to do with personality. It may be hard for Goode but he should not hide behind being Aboriginal. That would be racist.

UPDATE

Andrew Bolt pings the racist double think of the Left with a comment this morning about Tim Soutphommasane praising a war dance by Adam Goodes as “just having pride” and criticising another by white Australians as “suspicious”.

In a similar vein, the outstanding commentator Paul Sheehan from the SMH points out that the accusation of “racism” is one of the most poisoned accusation used almost exclusively by the Left to close down debate and allow open questioning. As a consequence it pours petrol onto the fire:

First among those is Andrew Pridham, a merchant banker, who is chairman of the Swans. He delivered this message to the public this week via Fairfax Media, “If you’re booing Adam Goodes, I’ve got bad news for you: you’re a racist”.
I’ve got bad news for Pridham: indiscriminate, heated, sanctimonious accusations do not help.
Then there is Jason Mifsud​, the most senior Indigenous official with the AFL. He has proposed that all Indigenous AFL players perform a war dance in support of Goodes. This suggestion is, at best, dubious and, at worst, dense.
Third, and most egregious, is Victoria’s Premier, Daniel Andrews, who said, “He is being booed by people, not all, but many of them, because they have no respect for him and no regard for him as an Aboriginal man and that is shameful”.
Andrews, Pridham, Mifsud and others should know that when you invoke blanket accusations of racism – or homophobia or xenophobia, for that matter – the chances of winning the argument are diminished and will harvest resentment towards blunderbuss reactions.

As for any obligation to be nothing but respectful of the Aboriginal gerontocracy, I ask: What makes them so special? …Is it not possible to be both an Aboriginal leader, and a vain, obstinate blow hard at the same time?

Kerryn PHOLI

This most extraordinary tirade was published last week by the outstanding writer Kerryn Pholi in The Spectator. As a once “favoured” Aboriginal woman, Pholi nowadays wants to be treated like everyone else, that is, as an Australian on her merits, and not as some sort of “deserving” Aboriginal.

In one brief article, she exposing the hypocrisy of the Aboriginal Industry on the one hand, and the fawning deference white Australians patronisingly pour onto the “wise” elders on the other.

Given that journalists are supposed to be the most hardboiled of cynics, our national newspaper’s enthusiasm for the cause of Aboriginal constitutional recognition is hard to fathom. Perhaps the Australian is banking on being front and centre when the news of a ‘Yes’ vote drops, to capture the perfect image of grizzled old campaigners doing victorious high-fives all around.

The media’s critical faculties tend to shrivel in the presence of Aboriginal leaders, allowing the cultural significance of Aboriginal recognition to expand to mythic proportions. If we are to debate Aboriginal recognition in a sensible way, we need to entertain the possibility that the venerable greybeards pushing for recognition are not infallible. The seniors chasing their own ‘67 moment won’t be the ones living with the aftermath, and the ideals they have long supported might not be shared by those who come after. Perhaps the challenge for the PM is not how to make good on his promise to deliver Aboriginal recognition, but how to provide the present Aboriginal leadership with a satisfying, face-saving, last hurrah.

Expressions of public dissent violate the smug Brussels worldview in which all EU decisions are for the best, in the best of all possible worlds. Any challenge provokes accusations of populism and xenophobia. Nothing can be more alien to the Brussels mind than the cut and thrust of referendum debates over Europe — it risks giving the people a say over matters that Europe’s managerial political caste consider theirs alone.

And these people suggest that anyone who disagrees with them simply must be right wing fascists, indeed Nazis. A familiar tactic?

The idea that voters are the bearers of a fascistic, nationalist or irrational virus that threatens to tear down civilisation, emerged again two weeks ago when Tony Blair waded into the British referendum debate. “Nationalism is a powerful sentiment. Let that genie out of the bottle and it is a Herculean task to put it back. Reason alone struggles. The referendum on Europe carries with it the same risk,” he said.

Don’t be fooled by the apocalyptic scaremongering: these people are just frightened of losing. Blair revealed as much when he warned about “the perilous fragility of public support for the sensible choice”. It is a grubby mindset that reveals the lack of strong proEuropean ideals among the EU’s supporters. They, our managers, people like Blair, know best. We, the voters, the irrational public, cannot be trusted to be “sensible”. The EU’s enduring hostility to referendums reveals it to be a union of rulers united in mistrust of the people. The referendum question is the acid test.

All of this reminds me of William F. Buckley Jr’s observation that he would rather entrust the government of the United States to the first 400 people listed in the Boston telephone directory than to the faculty of Harvard University.

The same goes for a random sample of Eurosceptics compared to the EU bureaucracy.

“How do I know that increased CO2 will not kill the coral reefs and shellfish? Let me count the ways” Patrick Moore

Patrick Moore, a co-founder and former leader of Greenpeace has skewered yet again the monstrous dissembling of the global warming carbonistas. If their silly science is so certain why do they need to lie and exagerate so much?

The propaganda is ramping up again as we approach the Paris climate summit. Since the temperature on Earth has stubbornly stopped rising, the new scare is ocean acidification and the constant threats to our Great Barrier Reef.

Something dire was needed to prop up the climate disruption narrative. “Ocean acidification” was invented to provide yet another apocalyptic scenario, only this one required no warming or severe weather, just more CO2 in the atmosphere.

Moore takes the reader through chapter and verse of why the menace of increased CO2 and ocean acidification is plain wrong-headed. Through the last half a billion years when life forms emerged, the CO2 content of the atmosphere was up to ten times higher than at present. As one would expect, the sea also has its own way of resisting acidification.

Then there is the obvious practical observation:

Finally, it is a fact that people who have saltwater aquariums sometimes add CO2 to the water in order to increase coral growth and to increase plant growth. The truth is CO2 is the most important food for all life on Earth, including marine life. It is the main food for photosynthetic plankton (algae), which in turn is the food for the entire food chain in the sea.

Moore concludes rather forcefully that:

For some reason, the proponents of catastrophic global warming ignore this fact. They talk of “carbon pollution” as if CO2 is a poison. If there were no CO2 in the global atmosphere there would be no life on this planet. Surely, that should be enough to permit questioning the certainty of those who demonise this essential molecule.

Don’t expect Will Stephan, Tim Flannery or any other of the highly paid carbonistas to respond to arguments of common fact with specific counter arguments. After all, who was there to correct the leader of the free world President Obama when he publicly announced that CO2, or was it global warming, was causing his daughter’s asthma attacks.

“A celebration that was once simple communist propaganda can, and should, be repurposed to celebrate the forces that actually lift people out of poverty and inequality.”

Yes, here it is again. It always sounds, to my ears, like Earmuffs day, or Quilting Day, or Lips Appreciation day, or Lost Puppy Dog Day. It’s seems unnecessary and mildly patronising: a sort of giant ‘Whatever’ Day.

Not surprisingly, International Women’s Day’s origins were in American socialism and Eastern European communism. It was originally declared by the American Socialist Party in 1909, Apparently, according to Leon Trotsky, it indirectly triggered a series of events that sparked the Russian February revolution in 1917.

It’s all about equality you see, but the rub is that equality of women is highest in prosperous, capitalist, free market societies. The feminist collectives would of course not understand this but there is massive evidence that this is the case. It is also a reason why people like Julie Bishop dissociates herself from this ideologically bend crowd, as recently seen on ABC’s Q and A.

As compared with men, women in economically freer countries hold more elected seats in government, have longer life expectancies, achieve higher education levels, and earn higher incomes than do women in less economically free countries. In short, in freer economies, women’s lives are longer, more prosperous and more self-directed.

So, there you have it. Nor is it true that this is only because these countries are richer and therefore able to afford more equality.

If we restrict our vision to the poorest countries, the same pattern emerges. Comparing the Fraser and UN data sets, we find that, of the poorest 25 per cent of countries (as measured by per capita GDP), the half that are more economically free achieve more gender equality than do the half that are less economically free. According to the UN’s own numbers, women suffer less inequality in poor, economically free countries than they do in poor, economically unfree countries.

One wonders why so many feminists seems to take the anti-capitalist side of almost any debate whilst also studiously ignoring the women and children in appalling conditions in those countries where freedom plays almost no role.

A landslide of evidence over the past century shows that, regardless of our good intentions, the more we allow governments to control markets, the more poverty and inequality we experience.
There is no better time to note these facts than on International Women’s Day. A celebration that was once simple communist propaganda can, and should, be repurposed to celebrate the forces that actually lift people out of poverty and inequality. The evidence suggests that equality doesn’t come at the end of the government’s gun, but at the end of the free market’s handshake.

The dramatic rise in the polls for Tony Abbott is heartening. The Left, as usual, does not understand why. Abbott is changing. He is appeasing the Left less and standing on principle. They hate him with a loathing and this drives them mad and reminds people why they got rid of Labor a year and a half ago.

The Prime Minister pointed out the bias and the disgrace Gillian Triggs has brought on herself and the Human Rights Commission. Voters understood, in spite of the reactionary support from the ABC, the ALP swinging handbags, Fairfax and the Left generally.

The Prime Minister’s honest comments about the pathetic claim by the same media that David Hicks had somehow been vindicated for joining, not one, but two terrorist organisations and shooting machine guns at the Indian Army shows that the electorate likes straight talking.

The Prime Minister’s honest comments about Muslims and the double standards of the commentariat in the name of multiculutral harmony may be at an end. People are aching for a leader to speak up and call out the traitors in our midst. They know what “Je suis Charlie” actually means.

Malcolm Turnbull’s honest comments about Triggs and a while back about the ABC’s balance was a timely reminder to Abbott supporters and Liberal backbenchers exactly what he does stand for. This is probably sufficient to blow his chances for leadership clear out of the water. Thank God and thanks Malcolm.

What an irony that Fran Kelly thinks quite the opposite. The poor woman is deluded into thinking that voters are turning back to the Liberals because Turnbull looks a shoe in to roll Abbott. Even Michelle Grattan scoffed at Fran on air, “a bit far fetched” she thought, for suggesting such an implausable idea. A priceless exchange from from “Their ABC”.

This stridency from the media makes people sit up and notice. I always think back to the 1988 Referendum, which invited us to vote ‘Yes’ on four questions. Supported by both parties and most of the media, the Australian people, smelling a rat with such collusion, gave all four of the propositions a resounding ‘No’, with their collective upturned finger. That reassured me immensely about Australian democracy and our plain ordinary, reliable common sense.

In other words, when things in the media become too shrill people become suspicious.

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